Making the click-through worthwhile: Newspapers fight back against the president; Twitter is a message board; and an overlooked white-bashing story from a journalist.
Newspapers Unite
Today, newspapers across the country are running editorials against President Trump’s attacks on the press. To have a free press is to have a free society. Were Trump’s criticism of the press to transform into action we would have a dire situation on our hands, but given that this hasn’t happened, isn’t this endeavor not just futile but counterproductive? Jack Shafer’s most-recent Politico column is convincing:
Most journalists agree that there’s a great need for Trump rebuttals. I’ve written my share. But this Globe-sponsored coordinated editorial response is sure to backfire: It will provide Trump with circumstantial evidence of the existence of a national press cabal that has been convened solely to oppose him. When the editorials roll off the press on Thursday, all singing from the same script, Trump will reap enough fresh material to whale on the media for at least a month. His forthcoming speeches almost write themselves: By colluding against me, the fake media proved once and for all, that they are in cahoots with the Democrats and have declared themselves to be my true political opposition . . .
The Globe’s anti-Trump project is also an exercise in redundancy, not to mention self-stroking. Most newspapers have already published a multitude of editorials and columns rebuking the president for his trash-talking of the press. Most major editorial boards opposed Trump’s election, according to this tally by Business Insider. The largest of the 19 newspapers to endorse Trump was the Las Vegas Review-Journal, owned by one of his faithful donors, Sheldon Adelson. More than 240 endorsed Hillary Clinton. Editorial-page sentiment against Trump remains largely unchanged since the election, making the call for a collective reprimand all the more pointless.
Another problem with a nationally coordinated pro-press catechism is that the audience likely to reap the greatest benefit from the haranguing — Trump and many in his base — tends not to read newspapers in the first place. While there’s always value in preaching to the choir — that’s why churches hold services every Sunday — the combined weight of 200 pro-press editorials is not likely to move the opinion needle or deter Trump from defaming and threatening reporters.
Twitter Is a Message Board
I wrote in “defense” of Alex Jones a little while back, about one week before he was swiftly banned from Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. Put more accurately, I used Alex Jones’s case as the frame to argue that social-media companies cannot be trusted to exercise editorial judgment in kicking people off their platforms. Now he’s been put in “time-out” by Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO.
As a matter of preferential intensity I won’t be losing any sleep over Jones’s purging — especially because his harassment of Sandy Hook families may well turn out to be defamatory and libelous. What I care far more about is how social-media executives manage the gigantic platforms over which they preside. Facebook and Twitter, being advertising companies, want to increase their market share and so have waded into the news business. There’s a strong case that journalists indeed do have a social responsibility beyond that of simply maximizing value for their shareholders; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other executives have so far proven to be both adept at the latter and terrible stewards of The Discourse. Their slapdash, inconsistent content policies create a situation where nobody knows what the rules are, and everyone is trying to convince executives to marginalize their political enemies. It’s a bad soup.
At least in the case of Twitter, John Herrman compares Twitter to a forum, a message board of the sort that was common in the 2000s. It’s far from the first time this comparison has been made, but Herrman gives the subject its most sustained treatment to date. When news broke that conservatives were being “shadowbanned” on Twitter, it caught Herrman’s attention: Terms like that share roots in the web as it existed before the rise and dominance of mainstream social media.
‘Shadow banning’ was popularized on a niche-but-influential forum called Something Awful. Its administrators and moderators, dealing with often-unruly and trollish users, were breezy authoritarians, removing, punishing and humiliating users for violating the rules, or simply because they wanted to. . . .
The internet of old — composed largely of thousands of scattered communities populated by people who shared interests, identities, causes or hatreds — has been mostly paved over by the social-media giants. In this new landscape, basic intelligible concepts of community become alien: The member becomes the user; the peer becomes the follower; and the ban becomes not exile, but death. It is not surprising that the angriest spirits of the old web occasionally manifest in the new one. But what’s striking is how effectively they can haunt it, and how ill-equipped it is to deal with them. . . .
On Twitter, it may seem that you are talking to friends or peers, and that the space is controlled or even safe. But it’s not: It’s shared with and extremely vulnerable to those with a desire to disrupt or terrorize it. In order to function, Twitter must make its users feel at home in the most public space devised by humankind. The platform can’t easily say what smaller intentional forums can: “We don’t want this here; you’re violating the spirit of our community; go away.” It is too big, with too many people present for too many different reasons, to be a site for any one sort of conversation. It exercises absolute authority over its service, of course, but must pretend to do so carefully, sparingly and only when forced to.
This seems right to me. There used to be a decentralized constellation of bulletin-board forums where moderators could control the conversation as they saw fit and users knew why they were logged on: to discuss some topic of interest of them and participate in some discrete, almost tangible online community. Now there are a few websites that have cannibalized all this activity, and the folkways once inherent to smaller message boards have been massively scaled up. These message boards are professionalized, such that how you Tweet can make your career; they incentivize public shaming; the register of conversation on them is almost uniformly shrill. And the executives can’t stop it: They want as many users as possible, sure, but they also aren’t equipped to moderate such a large forum.
More on White-Bashing
We became acquainted with the practice and its utility during Jeonghazi, but another incident happened around the same time: Tech reporter Rani Molla had tweets of her own about a Washington Post story about working-class whites being marginalized by an emerging Hispanic majority in their workplace and town. “Oh shut the f*** up,” she wrote. “How does it feel to have every advantage and still be a whiny a**hole?”
Scientist Razib Khan writes eloquently on the subject:
There were literally two South Asian families (as opposed to international students, or an adoptee here and there) in the whole county where I grew up as an adolescent. So yes, I was part of a very distinct minority. But my father also had a doctorate in a physical science. I was known to be a highly sociable person, albeit on the nerdy side. I knew I would go to college. Almost everyone in my extended family went to college, even though many of them lived in a country where very few people went to college. I came from a family background where certain things were taken for granted, and tacit. Those things happen to put me in a good position for the 21st-century economy. . . .
There were other kids I grew up with and knew casually. They were all white because almost everyone else was white. They came from families where the father had been a logger, or worked on a ranch, but eventually that work disappeared. They in their own turn assumed they’d find some job in the valley, perhaps go work at a plant in Pendleton or John Day. Even twenty years ago we knew that something was going sideways. The logging jobs were disappearing. But there were families who had lived in the area for generations, and these were kids who didn’t want to move away. These were kids who were never academically oriented. But they were family oriented.
To be honest I felt sorry for them. I never thought they had “every advantage.” Yes, no one ever yelled racial slurs at them. But they didn’t come from stable homes, and they didn’t seem to have a stable future. These were kids who were lost in a world that was passing them by. If the aristocracy of white skin arose with Andrew Jackson’s America, by the 1990s that dream was fading rapidly.
I would only add that “white equals advantaged” is far too coarse-grained of a measure to capture the way that social relations affect our lives.